Reuters Odd News Summary

A German shop assistant in a late-night convenience store
chased away two armed robbers demanding money with the hose of a
vacuum cleaner she was using to clean her shop in Berlin's
Neukoelln district, police said on Wednesday. One of the two
would-be robbers was brandishing a pistol and demanded she turn
over the money from her cash register in the attempted robbery
just after midnight on Tuesday.

Colorado man wakes to find black bear nibbling ankle: local
paper

A resident of a Colorado mountain town woke from a nap on
his deck to find a black bear nibbling his ankle, but later
rejected a request by wildlife officials to put a trap on his
property, a local newspaper reported on Tuesday. Peter Rizzuto,
77, told The Aspen Times he thought at first the creature was a
large dog. He said last week's encounter was very brief, and the
skin on his ankle was not broken.

Canada police apologize after sex talk broadcast from
helicopter

Police in the Canadian city of Winnipeg apologized on
Tuesday after a lewd conversation about sex was broadcast from
the loudspeakers of a police helicopter to a neighborhood below.
Officers on a routine helicopter patrol on Monday night
inadvertently activated the aircraft's public address system
while they were having a private conversation, the Winnipeg
Police Service said in a statement.

Brave kitty stares down mountain lion in viral Colorado
video

A video of an unfazed, fluffy house cat staring down a large
mountain lion as the predator paws at a Colorado kitchen window
has gone viral, receiving nearly 1 million views on YouTube in
just a couple of days. The footage, recorded at a home in the
Rocky Mountains about 10 miles west of Boulder, shows the cat
sitting on the windowsill and meowing as the much-bigger
mountain lion looks into the house, its eyes glinting gold in
the light.

Berlin Zoo puts down star polar bear cub Knut's aging mother

The aging mother of Knut, the famous hand-reared polar bear
who captured German hearts and the world's attention in his
short life, was put down at Berlin Zoo on Tuesday because it
said she was blind, deaf and suffering. Tosca, who rejected her
cub Knut at birth in 2006, was nearly 30 years old, the zoo
said.